Photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images

On Monday morning, research firm Bernstein came up with some crypto advice for its Wall Street clients: “Buy everything you can.” Ever since Bitcoin was invented fifteen years ago, this would be the kind of bloodshot, crazy-eyed phone call you could ignore because it came from a fanatic. But Bernstein isn’t some crypto-piled boiler room operation. Rather, it is part of the staid French investment bank Societe Generale and dates back to the 1960s, when the US was still on the gold standard. The newspaper immediately spread throughout the financial sector. When I started writing this column, Bitcoin was testing new highs above $82,000; by the time I was done it had eclipsed $88,000. Looking at the massive trading volume, it was probably the biggest day ever for crypto.

Welcome to the Donald Trump era of crypto. It’s barely been a week since Trump won the election, but it seems increasingly likely that the next four years in cryptoland will make Sam Bankman-Fried’s time as the industry’s furry mascot seem tame by comparison. What happened? It’s not that there has been a mass conversion among Wall Street’s most cynical moneymen to the utopian promises of the digital future. No new invention has been made, no new use discovered that would make Bitcoin or any other digital currency more likely to become part of your daily life. The calculation here is that all the madness of the pandemic-era boom could come into effect again — and this time, like Trump, the industry is being encouraged to become even bigger, richer, and more unabashed than ever before.

There is no guarantee that bitcoin, or any other digital token, will be worth more tomorrow than it is today. Volatility and sky-high risks are a central part of investing in crypto, and that didn’t change on November 6. But crypto in 2025 seems to be the industry’s best chance to make itself something bigger than just a financial afterthought – Over the next four years, the industry definitely wants to make itself institutional. The coming Trump economy, if it is anything like the last one, will be very good for business, with lower taxes and interest rates, freeing up more money for people to speculate. And the industry has already made it as easy to buy crypto as anything else available on the New York Stock Exchange. Which has broadly led to more money entering the space, leading to rising prices and reduced volatility. Since this winter, when regulators allowed 401(k) money to flow into bitcoin ETFs, giants like BlackRock have acted as a bridge between the traditional and digital financial worlds — which in turn has only served to make crypto so big. bigger.

The biggest break with the Biden administration, however, will likely be the extent to which the industry will police itself. That is at least partly the result of an extremely aggressive lobbying campaign. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase – the largest US cryptocurrency exchange – made a bet that he could extract more than $100 million from his industry to elect a crypto-friendly government – ​​and he ended up with a historic string of wins that left some of the others can match. the great Wall Street trades of all time. Bloomberg states that of the 48 races where cryptocurrency backed a candidate, the industry won every one. (There are eight left, and all but three appear to be breaking towards the industry). Washington DC’s most powerful strongholds against the industry, including Democratic Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, are losing their jobs. The winners, like Brown’s successor Bernie Moreno, are openly pushing for crypto to be laissez-faire treatment. One senator, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, has introduced a bill that would require the Treasury Department to buy and hold a “strategic reserve” of 1 million bitcoins for 20 years — putting the U.S. more on par with El Salvador, which has tried, and mostly failed, to integrate the asset into everyday life.

It’s not just lawmakers. Howard Lutnick, who oversees Trump’s staffing, is the CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald — which happens to be where Tether, the lifeblood of the crypto industry, keeps its money. Elon Musk, who has funded at least $119 million of Trump’s get-out-the-vote operations, is a big supporter of cryptocurrencies — especially Grapdogecoin — and Tesla owns vast amounts of bitcoin. (His promise to oversee a Ministry of Government Efficiency to eradicate government spending is, I’m sorry to say, a crypto joke).

Of course, the first Trump administration oversaw a wild crypto bull market in 2017 and prosecuted numerous scams and frauds at the time. What the crypto industry complains about most these days is that the federal government is not setting crypto-specific regulations, and is using the courts to determine policy. Never mind that this practice originated under Trump, when he wrote that he was “not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” But since July, when Trump promised at the annual Bitcoin conference to abolish Gensler and make the US the global center of crypto, his late-in-life conversion has been accepted by the industry without much thought.

This is essentially what Bernstein and many others on Wall Street are excited about: pouring money into a relatively new asset class now that regulators and federal prosecutors appear willing to let it grow. Coinbase and MicroStrategy, a technology company that owns $10 billion in bitcoin, went vertical on Monday. The total market for all cryptocurrencies quickly reached $3 trillion – about the size of the French economy. In fact, the only digital asset to lose The money that made the top 100 was Monero – a cryptocurrency favored by the likes of North Korea because it is so useful for laundering large sums of money. (After all, the first Trump administration had prosecuted a decades-low number of white-collar crimes, so it’s not clear that money laundering would be a big priority.)

Last year, Bloomberg journalist Zeke Faux (a friend of mine) published a book called Number up about the various forms of scams and fraud that crypto makes possible. The title of the book comes from a quote by Dan Held, a director at a crypto exchange, who – apparently in all seriousness – quoted a sarcastic meme about crypto. “Number go up technology is a very powerful piece of technology,” he said, according to the book. ‘It’s the price. As the price goes higher, more people are aware of it and buy it in anticipation of the price rising further.” Of course, what he describes paved the way for many of the Ponzi-like schemes that have defined the crypto industry to date, not least the collapse of SBF’s crypto empire. (Not surprisingly, FTX, its exchange, was based in the Bahamas, which has notoriously hands-off and crypto-friendly laws. They have since returned.) Crypto doubters have continued to make the same case against the company again and again. : that digital assets provide a slow and expensive form of money, and that they are best used for speculation or crime.

Perhaps in the long run, all this speculation will cause another FTX-like crash – this one even bigger than the last. But for now, the crypto brothers are absolutely going ape.